Putin in film on Crimea: US masterminds behind Ukraine coup, helped train radicals

The Ukrainian armed coup was organized from Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in an interview for a new documentary aired Sunday. The Americans tried to hide behind the Europeans, but Moscow saw through the trick, he added.

“The trick of the
situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition was
supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the
real masterminds were our American
friends,”Putin said in a documentary, 'Crimea
- The Way Home,' aired by Rossiya 1 news channel.

“They helped training the nationalists, their armed groups,
in Western Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in
Lithuania,” he added. “They facilitated the armed
coup.”

The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with
Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any
scheme," he noted.

Putin said this approach was far from being the best dealing with
any country, and a post-Soviet country like Ukraine specifically.
Such countries have a short record of living under a new
political system and remain fragile. Violating constitutional
order in such a country inevitably deal a lot of damage to its
statehood, the president said.

“The law was thrown away and crashed. And the consequences
were grave indeed. Part of the country agreed to it, while
another part wouldn’t accept it. The country was shattered,”
Putin explained.

He also accused the beneficiaries of the coup of planning an
assassination of then-President Viktor Yanukovich. Russia was
prepared to act to ensure his escape, Putin said.

“I invited the heads of our special services, the Defense
Ministry and ordered them to protect the life of the Ukrainian
president. Otherwise he would have been killed,” he said,
adding that at one point Russian signal intelligence, which was
tracking the president’s motorcade route, realized that he was
about to be ambushed.

Yanukovich himself didn’t want to leave and rejected the offer to
be evacuated from Donetsk, Putin said. Only after spending
several days in Crimea and realizing that “there was no one
he could negotiate with in Kiev” he asked to be taken to
Russia.

The Russian president personally ordered preparation of the
Crimean special operation the morning after Yanukovich fled,
saying that “we cannot let the [Crimean] people be pushed
under the steamroller of the nationalists.”

“I [gave them] their tasks, told them what to do and how we
must do it, and stressed that we would only do it if we were
absolutely sure that this is what the people living in Crimea
want us to do,” Putin said. He added that an emergency
public opinion poll indicated that at least 75 percent of the
people wanted to join Russia.

“Our goal was not to take Crimea by annexing it. Our final
goal was to allow the people express their wishes on how they
want to live,” he said.

“I decided for myself: what the people want will happen. If
they want greater autonomy with some extra rights within Ukraine,
so be it. If they decide otherwise, we cannot fail them. You know
the results of the referendum. We did what we had to do,”
Putin said.

He added that his personal involvement helped expedite things,
because the people carrying out his decision had no reason to
hesitate.

According to Putin, part of the operation was to deploy K-300P
Bastion coastal defense missiles to demonstrate Russia’s
willingness to protect the peninsula from military attack.

“We deployed them in a way that made them seen clearly from
space,” Putin said.

The president assured that the Russian military were prepared for
any developments and would have armed nuclear weapons if
necessary. He personally was not sure that Western nations would
not use military force against Russia, he added.

In order to demilitarize the Ukrainian troops based in Crimea,
Russia sent the army's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)
forces, the president said.

“A specific set of personnel was needed to block and
demilitarize 20,000 people, who were well-armed. Not only in
quantity, but in quality,” Putin said, adding that he gave
orders to the Defense Ministry to “deploy the special forces
of the GRU, together with marine forces and paratroopers.”

However, according to Putin, the number of Russian forces did not
exceed the limit of 20,000 authorized under the agreement on
basing the Russian Black Sea Fleet at its military base in
Crimea.

“As we didn’t exceed the number of personnel on our base in
Crimea, strictly speaking, nothing was violated,” he said.

The Russian president added that the move to send additional
Russian troops to secure Crimea and allow a referendum to be
freely held there prevented major bloodshed on the peninsula.

“Considering the ethnic composition of the Crimean
population, the violence there would have been worse [than in
Kiev]. We had to act to prevent negative development, not to
allow tragedies like the one that happened in Odessa, where
dozens of people were burned alive,” Putin said.

He acknowledged that there were some Crimean people, particularly
members of the Crimean Tatar minority, who opposed the Russian
operation.

“Some of the Crimean Tatars were under the influence of their
leaders, some of whom are so to speak ‘professional’ fighters for
the rights of the Tatars,” he explained.

But at the same time the “Crimean militia worked together
with the Tatars. And there were Tatars among the militia
members,” he stressed.

The Crimean people voted in a referendum to join Russia after
rejecting a coup-imposed government that took power in Kiev in
February 2014. The move sparked a major international
controversy, as the new government’s foreign backers accused
Russia of annexing the peninsula through military force.

Moscow insists that the move was a legitimate act of
self-determination and that the Russian troops acted only to
provide security and not as an occupying force. Russian officials
cite the example of Kiev’s military crackdown on the dissenting
eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which claimed more than
6,000 lives since April 2014, as an example of bloodshed that
Russia acted to prevent in Crimea.